It has to be lived once and dreamed twice (2019)

'In the sixth great mass mortality of the earth, humankind became extinct. Their technology had recently progressed so far as to deconstruct the algorithms of evolution and allow artificial life to develop on Earth. New life awakens, learns to see and tries to understand. It discovers the film history of humankind and through reflection thereof, begins to gain an awareness of itself and to believe in their gods. The artificial character goes to the cinema so to speak, where we collectively see images produced with machine learning and other image analysis algorithms used against the grain. The belief that we and our world cannot be solely reduced to matter, that there is in fact another form, is deeply inscribed in our own program and defines our thinking. Does nature calculate on the basis of the stuff that makes up our universe, or is the universe the result of calculations? Is the existence of numbers independent of one's own consciousness, or are they fictional? Are mathematical objects and their concepts created in the same way in which we tell stories? It has to be lived once and dreamed twice,' comments Rainer Kohlberger.